Ninth City Burning (23 page)

“Naomi!” he calls again, jumping and waving for my attention. “It's me, Jax!”

Again I have the feeling that there is something peculiar about this place. For half a second, this Jax appears to me as two people: the one in a long shirt and cap, and another in a dark uniform. The second Jax seems about to speak to me, but then he vanishes. “I think I have met that boy somewhere,” I say to the bespectacled man. “Can we invite him over?”

“Most certainly not!” the bespectacled man says, with a laugh of amused
indignation. “You must be mistaking him for someone else. The boy could not possibly be an acquaintance of yours. Look at him—he's a filthy street urchin!”

And truly, the boy Jax does seem immoderately grubby. Now that I have a moment to inspect him more closely, it is plain he is fresh out of some gutter or other declivity. He is in desperate need of a bath, and the outlandish smock he wears in place of a shirt is deplorably soiled, his hat ragged and sweat-stained. I, meanwhile, have on a fine blue dress and white blouse, and my fingernails are clean. I do not know how these details escaped me before, for it is obvious this boy has no business in decent company. Yet he remains vocal in his bid for my attention. Other guests have begun to glance in his direction, frowning with distaste at this rude interruption to their supper.

It is embarrassing to be included in the noisy scene Jax has made, and I am relieved when the doorman finally takes hold of him and, with a firm hand, leads him out of the restaurant. But I am sorry, too, once he is gone. Perhaps it is the imploring look in his brown eyes or how wretched he seemed as the doorman hauled him away. A patter of raindrops against a nearby window reminds me of the biting weather, and I feel guilty knowing Jax has been cast out into it.

The bespectacled man takes note of my distress. “I'll speak to the maître d',” he says with an indulgent sigh. “The boy will be given something to eat and a warm place out of the rain. But I do hope you can agree we could not allow him to stay. Before one may enter civilized society, one must be prepared to behave in a civilized manner. You understand, don't you, Naomi?”

I believe I do. Jax was disturbing the order of this place. “Yes. I think so.”

My companion smiles, spectacles aflash with candlelight. “Wonderful. And with that settled, do you imagine we could continue our little concert?”

I had been waiting for just such an invitation. The renewed sound of my fiddle pleases the bespectacled man immensely, and as the notes gather, one of his hands rises into the air, tracing a gentle motion in time to my music. “What are you doing?” I ask, pausing midtune.

His hand goes still, his posture shifting, like someone awakened from a dream. His rapturous expression shifts to a small, embarrassed grin. “I
seem to have become a bit carried away,” he says. “Your music was so enchanting. Did I disturb you?”

“No.” In fact, I cannot remember ever having played so well. Each of his gestures seemed to add precision and flourish to my music, as if we were somehow playing together. “I am only curious.”

“An old habit of mine,” he says, his smile taking on a more bashful tint. “I was a conductor once, the leader of a symphony. Your playing took me back to another time, I'm afraid. I hope you can excuse a foolish old man his eccentricities.”

“No excuse is necessary. It was only something I had not seen before.” Though even as I say it, I wonder if this is true. Have I seen someone else “conduct” in that way? Was it something Papa used to do? “May I play again?”

“I would like nothing more,” replies the Maestro.

But even as I raise my bow to continue, there is a jarring thud at my window: Jax has appeared on the street outside, his face pressed to the glass. Somehow, he has become even filthier, as if his first act upon leaving this restaurant was to locate a pile of dung and roll in it. When he sees me gaping at him, he begins to pound with his palm, calling out in a voice that seems muffled to me but must be atrociously loud to be heard through the glass. I watch his lips form my name, and anger rises in me. The rain has become a cold slush, but I am not sorry for Jax anymore. He is nothing but a nuisance.

“Ignore him, Naomi,” the Maestro says serenely. “Someone will be along to deal with him soon. Play on.”

And sure enough, once my song begins again, two men arrive to confront Jax. They are tall, burly, and uniformed in crisp blue suits, badges of authority gleaming over their breast pockets. I feel confident they can take Jax someplace away from this weather, but more importantly, away from me. Jax, for his part, is fast losing enthusiasm for the task of rapping at my window. The sleet has turned to snow and begun gathering in wet piles on his shoulders and cap. When one of the men, tall helmet pulled low over his eyes, calls for Jax's attention, Jax drops his arms and turns away, ready to concede.

But just as the uniformed men are about to lead him away, someone else appears by Jax's side. The newcomer is neither hostile nor imposing, but he cuts an elegant figure in his black hat and long, fur-trimmed coat.
He carries a slim, silver-tipped cane in one hand; the other he lays in a firm but friendly fashion on Jax's shoulder. Instantly, the men in uniform become deferential and eager to please. I cannot quite hear what is said, but it seems this man is explaining that Jax means no harm and is indeed a fine and upstanding young man.

To my astonishment, he is not far from the mark: Though I have not seen it happen, Jax appears to have undergone a good scrubbing, and his tattered outfit has been exchanged for a clean set of tan trousers and a trim blue jacket. He still wears his ridiculous cap, though that, too, has been washed, and no one now objects to it. Indeed, the two uniformed men are fully satisfied with whatever tale they have been fed and presently proceed about their rounds, leaving Jax still outside my window. The man in the fur-trimmed coat tips his hat. Somehow, the falling snow does not seem to touch him.

Jax's eyes have come back to rest on me, though his new friend continues watching the uniformed men as they walk away. When they have disappeared from view, he bends to the street and clears the gathered snow from a patch of cobbled sidewalk. With the utmost ease and nonchalance, he pries up one of the paving stones and hefts it, as though testing its weight, then, with a casual sweep of his arm, hurls it through my window.

The glass shatters, as does a small, flower-filled vase on my table as the stone rolls over the place settings and onto the restaurant floor. The weather gusts in through the broken window, and suddenly I am surrounded by a riot of wind and snow. The Maestro leaps to his feet, a roar of outrage on his lips, but the man in the coat has already stepped into the restaurant by way of the shattered opening, daintily navigating the shards of glass with the aid of his cane.

“Howdy, Naomi,” he says, using the cane to tip back his hat, flashing a jaunty grin and laughing eyes. “It's me, your old buddy Charles. This has been an adventure to be sure, but I think we've had enough for today. What do you say to putting down that violin?”

“It is a fiddle,” I answer, wind howling around me.

“The fiddle, then. How about you give it to me?”

“Don't listen to him!” shouts the Maestro, his voice barely audible over the storm. Excepting myself, Jax, the Maestro, and this Charles, the restaurant is empty now and seems like it has been abandoned for years. Snow covers the floor and piles in banks against the walls; long daggers of
ice hang from the ceiling. But I do not intend to give in, no matter the weather. I raise bow and fiddle to begin a new song, but before I can produce a single note, Charles lunges forward, seizing my fiddle by its slender neck.

I start back, angry and affronted, only to find I am no longer in my restaurant. The Maestro is gone. There is dirt beneath my feet, and Charles is beside me, holding my wrist. In place of the elegant coat and hat I remember, he has on a black military uniform. We are in the midst of some torn-up wilderness, sundered ground and broken trees all around.

Charles releases my arm. “That was quite a performance, Naomi,” he says, oddly cheerful given our desolate surroundings. “The three of us are going to learn a lot from each other, I think.”

“What happened?” I demand, confused and angry. The ground patters softly as small rocks fall from the sky like sparse rain. “How did I get here?”

“You flew,” Charles informs me. “Very majestically, I might add. And what happened, Naomi, is that you experienced being fontani usikuu.”

I cannot quite hide the fear I feel at his words. I remember now the things Charles told me about what it meant to shade, how I would find myself in another place filled with strange and alien sights, shifting and fluid as a dream, though to me it would be my real life, if I remembered it at all, that would seem unreal. It came to pass exactly as he'd said, and all that time, while I played my fiddle, I was not master of myself. I traveled all the way here, wherever this is, without even knowing. I am glad Charles has turned to search the horizon and does not see my face. Something thuds into the earth next to him: the stump of a fair-sized tree. “Now, where has Jax gotten to?” he wonders. “Ah, there he is.”

Jax has appeared atop a mound of heaved-up earth. He slides down, bouncing on his rear for balance, and comes running toward us. “You got her!” he shouts to Charles. He sounds mightily surprised about it. “Hey, Naomi,” he says, scampering to a halt. “That was great!” He appears nearly as pleased with himself as Charles.

“Yes, fine work all around,” Charles agrees. “All right, let's go get something to eat. For some reason, I'm really craving a burrito. Jax, why don't you lead the way?”

Jax nods, as though all of this makes perfect sense, and begins walking into the desolate landscape.

“Pay attention, and stay close,” Charles says, urging me forward. He points toward Jax. “The force is strong with this one.”

“What is he talking about?” I ask Jax, falling into step at his side.

“Just ignore Charles when he says stuff like that,” Jax says. “He can be pretty weird sometimes.”

I
've figured out why no one ever comes back. From the Front, I mean. It's actually pretty obvious once you know a few things.

Optio Sorril laid it all out for us our first day at Limit Camp. We all went into this big room, all the new recruits, and we sat there while she told us about the war and how it started, and how if we don't beat the Valentines, everyone in the world is going to die. It was a pretty big shock, I'll say that much. Hexi was sitting right next to me, and her mouth was all hanging open, but Spammers gave me this sideways look and rolled his eyes, like he couldn't believe the Prips actually expected us to swallow such a monumental load of crap. There were a lot of people there just like us, all dragged from some settlement or other, and you could tell a lot of them felt the same way.

Sorril didn't expect us to believe her, though, not right away. She said we were going to have to get used to a very different, like, reality than the one we knew, and that would take some time. We would have a lot of questions. So for now, we'd split up into groups to talk to people she'd brought in from the Legion. We could ask them anything. I ended up in a group with this sort of fat old Legion guy who said he'd been at the Front, that he'd actually fought the Valentines. Spammers was in the same group, and he asked so many questions, it was like the kid couldn't stop talking. He was trying to catch the Legion guy in a lie, but the guy had an answer for everything. Also, he was missing a leg. He said the Legion had real good medical people, like they could practically bring a guy back from the dead, but there were some injuries they couldn't heal, and his leg was one of them. That's the only reason he wasn't at the Front now—because of his leg. After the Legion guy left, I expected Spammers to start
going off about how it was all crap right away, but he didn't. He got pretty quiet, like he was thinking real hard.

And the thing was, it did kind of fit. I mean, we always figured there was something weird going on with the Prips. Like, whenever they showed up for the draft, they'd bring that big ship, the harvester, and it would just float there, even though it was obviously real gigantic and heavy. So you knew the Prips could do way more than we could, like with machines and everything. We'd talk about it all the time, my kiddos and me, about what sorts of stuff the Prips had, like flying cars and moving stairs and three-dimensional telecasts and whatnot. But no one ever guessed anything like this thelemity business. That stuff is berserk, it really is. The first time I floated up into the harvester, I was pretty sure I'd just died or something. And then we got on board and the walls would like
talk
to you and doors appeared out of nowhere and every time you wanted to sit, a chair would just grow up out of the ground. I thought I'd gone crazy. So after all that, it's actually not so hard to believe a bunch of aliens appeared out of nowhere and started trying to kill everyone. Spammers is probably way more like analytical about it, though.

Anyway, when old Sorril showed us these moving pictures of the Valentines the next day, I wasn't as blown away as everyone else. I'd seen moving pictures before, naturally, like on telecasts and entertainment programs. What I mean is, seeing all that wasn't what made me believe in the Valentines.

Sorril started off with these pictures from before the war, what she called the “Common Era.” There was some footage of people living out in like hellion territory, all alone in the middle of nowhere, but most of what Sorril showed us looked kind of like Granite Shore, only the houses and vehicles were a little strange. What really got me, though, was the way people dressed, everyone different from everyone else. Like you could see a thousand people, and no two would have the exact same clothes.

Next we saw pictures from “Valentine's Day,” which was the day the Valentines showed up, obviously. Most of it was this real shaky footage of people running and explosions and all of that. You couldn't really see what was happening. The only clear shots were of the sky with all of these crazy lights shooting all over the place. I'm sure it was scary being there, but it was hard to tell, just watching.

The last thing Sorril showed us
was
pretty scary. She got rid of the
machine she'd been using to show us that old footage, then sort of waved her hand, and these new pictures appeared out of nowhere. Sorril told us we were looking through the eyes of a soldier fighting at the Front, in a battle that'd happened about twenty-five years ago, our time, but it wasn't like any battle
I'd
ever seen. The ground was very crumbly and sort of fuzzy green, like moldy bread, and the air was kind of green, too, and hazy. Up ahead was something that looked like a wall of smoke rising out of the moldy-bread ground. Pretty soon, though, you realized it was really a battle, and what you thought was smoke was actually everyone fighting. They'd made themselves into this big floating wall, way up in the air, but they were so far away, you couldn't really see them all individually and whatever. It really did look like smoke, the way it swirled and swept around, but that was just the battle going up and down and in every direction. Something on the other side was trying to break through the wall, and after a minute, a little sliver of the battle broke off and came floating toward us, still looking a lot like smoke until it got close and turned into these things crashing down right on top of us.

Sorril stopped the picture then, so we could get a good look at the things falling out of the sky. They reminded me a bit of spiders because they had eight legs and no real face, though really they were pretty different from spiders. They were much bigger, for one thing, and half their legs pointed up, like arms. Also they didn't move the way spiders do. When Sorril started the picture again, they kind of galloped along. It was more like, if you took two really huge dogs and sewed them together, sort of back-to-back, then covered them in shiny black metal, that'd be pretty much what was coming down on you there.

The things, Sorril said, were called “Valentine Type 3s.” That wasn't how the Valentines actually looked, of course. What we were seeing was a kind of armor. The Valentines had all sorts of fighters, and since we didn't know exactly how one was different from another, we categorized them generally by size and what they do in battle. The Type 3 was the infantry type, roughly human-sized. We'd be learning about all the other types, too, but the Type 3 was the one we'd be fighting the most.

Sorril turned off the pictures then, and for a while she just sort of looked at us. She said there was a lot we still didn't know, not just about our enemy but about the world we were being asked to defend. What she wanted us to understand was that it was
our
world, and we were fighting
for everything and everyone we'd ever known. Now it was time to learn how. If we thought the Valentines looked scary, just wait until they saw the fighters she'd make out of us.

She was pretty convincing, old Sorril was. People started cheering even before she was done talking. Mersh was so loud he left my ears ringing. Even Spammers didn't smirk the way he usually does when he hears people talking about the Legion. But all I did was stare into the space where the moldy-looking ground and the green sky had been. By the time Hexi started shaking my shoulder and asking if I was coming to dinner, almost everyone had already left. She probably thought I was just stunned from getting my first look at the Valentines, but what got to me about that battle wasn't
what
we would have to fight. It was
where
.

The Realms were a big part of Sorril's speech that first day, about how the war started and everything, but I don't think most people really understood what she was talking about. I mean, aliens trying to kill us, that wasn't too hard to imagine, but I couldn't quite get how there were all these other worlds out there, places that were real but also sort of not real because they didn't exist anywhere we could see. It was pretty confusing. The one-legged Legion guy said it was like if you spent your entire life living in one room, and never left because you didn't know what a door was or how to work one, so when you finally went to another room, you'd think it was a whole different universe, but really, that room had been there all along. And that's how it was for us. Before the Valentines came, we didn't know the Realms existed. We thought our world was the only one. But it turns out there are doors between the Realms, too. You just need to know how to open them. I guess that kind of made sense. But it wasn't until I saw that battle, with the moldy ground and the two armies crashing into each other in the middle of the hazy green sky, that it really got to me how the Realms were someplace
else
.

Some of the Realms are supposed to be sort of like Earth, with air you can breathe and water you can drink and everything, but a lot of them aren't. A lot of them are totally different, like the place with the hazy green sky and the moldy ground. The real crazy thing, though, is it's not just the air and water that are different in the Realms.
Time
is different, too. So one day here isn't the same as one day in the other Realms. Because the world where we live is really just another Realm anyway, one Sorril calls “Hestia.” And for some reason, time moves faster here than anywhere else we've
seen. What that means is, if you're in the Realms for a year and come back to Hestia, a lot more than a year will have gone by. How much depends on which Realm you go to. So a year in some Realm might be twenty years in Hestia, or it might be fifty years, or a hundred. It's
always
more, though. No one knows why. That's just how it is. So even though to us the war with the Valentines has been going on for like five hundred years, out in the Realms it's only been thirty or forty. That's what old Sorril'd meant about the battle happening twenty-five years ago “our time.” Most everyone who'd been fighting was still out there at the Front if they hadn't already been killed, and for them it'd maybe been only a couple of months. There are actually people alive now who were
there
when the Valentines first attacked. Hearing that about knocked me out of my chair. I realized something, too. I knew why no one comes back from the Front. The truth is, some of them
do
come back, like the one-legged guy, but when they do, there's no one left who remembers them.

When I saw that battle, the place with the moldy ground and the green sky, that's when it finally hit me. Even if I survive the Front, Camareen won't be here, or if she is, she won't be the Camareen I remember. I would have done anything to get her back. Now I know I never will.

That night, I find Camareen's music, the sheet Mersh brought for me with her words at the bottom.
Come back.
That's all she had time to write, probably the last thing I'll ever have from her. I think about what it would be like, really coming back. Everyone in the Legion does at least three tours at the Front, six months each, with maybe a month in between to rest up. So say two years for me. Here, in Hestia, that's like fifty to a hundred years, depending on where in the Realms you're fighting. Let's say I make it. I'm maybe nineteen or twenty, and Camareen, if she's around at all, is seventy or eighty. I try to picture her with white hair and wrinkles, but I can't. All I see is her green eyes.

Spammers sees me sitting there with the sheet of music, and he guesses what I'm thinking in about five seconds. He's a real smart guy most of the time. “Hey, boyo,” he says, sitting down on my bunk. “You just can't stop getting shat on, can you? We'll have to work on that about you.”

“You'll want to stand back a bit,” I say. “Don't want any splashing on you, next time the shit starts raining down.”

Hexi bounces onto the bunk beside me. “Optio Sorril says that's pretty
much what war is, for us legionaries,” she says. “Getting shat on, I mean. Only one to blame is Romeo.”

“Romeo” is another name for the Valentines. Early on in the war, people started calling them the “Unknown Alien Race,” which seems like a good name to me, because at least it says something about them. A lot of people spoke English back then, not just bivvies and hellions, and in English, “Unknown Alien Race” shortens to “UAR.” They had this special code to keep different letters from getting confused over the radio, and “UAR” was “Uniform Alfa Romeo.” Pretty soon, everyone was just saying “Romeo.” It's how most legionaries talk about the Valentines, like they're all one person or something, so it's kind of weird hearing Hexi talk that way. It's also weird hearing her say “shat.”

“So think about it like this,” Spammers says. “You're just getting some practice ahead of time. When we're really knee-deep in shit, you'll feel right at home.”

“You two sound like you wouldn't mind a little shit,” I say. I'm not surprised to see Hexi in a good mood. That girl can always find something to be happy about. It's like her special talent. But Spammers, that's strange. His chipperness isn't nearly as sarcastic as usual. Those two aren't the only ones acting noisy, either. There are about fifty of us in the barracks, some from Granite Shore but a bunch from other settlements, too, and everyone seems excited to start training after listening to old Sorril.